Medicine: Premature Pill Talk

"A new pill that costs 15¢ looks like your best bet to protect against atomic-bomb radiation," read an A.P. dispatch last week out of Burlington, Vt., citing "top nuclear scientists." The A.P. went on: "You could store it in your medicine cabinet just like aspirin ... If you had 15 minutes' warning of an atomic or H-bomb attack, you could gobble one of the pills." Unfortunately, all this was Utopian wishful thinking.

The facts, reported by Dr. David G. Doherty of the Atomic Energy Commission's famed Oak Ridge National Laboratory: several compounds built...

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